THE NONEROTICIZING PEDOPHILE: A Convenient Scapegoat
george spelvin
The terms pedophile and child molester are synonymous, right? That’s what many professional writers seem ~o assume. J. A. Nelson is not so hasty. In the 1989 volume of the Journal of Sex Education and Therapy, he coined two useful terms: an eroticizing pedophile “acts on the sexual impulses,” while a noneroticizing pedophile “loves children just as much but exerts greater (sometimes extreme) impulse control.”
Most other writers on the subject do not seem to recognize this. We sometimes hear it said that children’s writer Lewis Carroll, children’s writer J. M. Barrie, and movie producer Joseph Cornell were attracted to children but never molested them--as if we should expect them to. In the 1971 volume of Psychonomic Science, Atwood&Howell showed that deviant sexual preferences could be detected through pupil dilation. They expressed hope that this technique would be used for forensic purposes. Then “child molesters can be identified without having to catch them ‘in the act.”’ If Atwood&Howell have their way, hundreds of innocent people can be jeopardized for nothing more than their feelings.
Not only is it obvious that not all pedophiles are sexual abusers; it is possible that pedophiles and sexual abusers are two distinct groups. A professional therapist once told me that he has worked with over 1000 molesters and diagnosed only 3 of them as pedophiles. In a report in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry in 1959, Toobert et al. gave a sample of incarcerated molesters--which they called pedophiles--a test which included the item “I enjoy children.” Believe it or not, the subjects tended to mark that item False! And the Greek word literally means “lover of children”?
In 1978, the Gay Left Collective newsletter quoted a German survey of 200 sexual abusers in which not even one offender preferred children to adult partners. So pedophiles might even be safer than the male population as a whole.
So why has this finding been published in Germany and not in the United States? Probably because of Germany’s liberal views on nudity. In a culture where nudity is a common sight on the beaches and at the swimming pools, they probably don’t even prosecute adults for looking and showing. Yet researchers such as E. F. Hammer, J. W. Mohr, and J. H. Gagnon tell us many sexual offenses against children are nothing more than peekaboo games.
Which is more constructive--seeking the real culprit, or taking it out on the closest available victim?
